Saturday, 15 April 2017

Starting with Why

It was a Monday night like any other. The neighbours were all gathered around the table to share the usual Monday night dinner and stories from our day. This night, one story in particular piqued my interest.

One of my neighbours, Mrs W, is a highschool teacher specialising in Commerce, Geography and Economics. Her story for the day was about a video she had shown one of her classes.

The video was Bea Johnson's Zero Waste Lifestyle. Mrs W told me all about Bea and how she shopped and lived to produce zero waste. I was intrigued by how this woman could go zero waste (well close enough to zero). It didn't happen over night mind you, she has been at this for over a decade.

This concept really struck with me. I would lie awake at night thinking of ways my own family could cut waste and declutter our lives. I researched more, found more blogs, more zero waste movements that continued to pique my interest.

During my clicking around the interwebs, another concept that caught my interest was minimalism. I came across The Minimalists and once again become intrigued with how these two young men could be so minimalist.

So many questions whirred in my mind - Why do we need all this stuff? Does it make us happy? Why do we have so much waste? What could we buy in bulk? What could we refuse?

And so I decided to take some action - I would see how far we could minimise our waste and declutter our lives and what the outcome would be.....so here we go....